Fun new feature in Google Reader: add notes to shared items. I've been wanting this recently, so that when I share a feed, I can attach my own little blurb. And it comes with a bookmarklet, so now I can share items without having found them from a feed. Hurray! My own little digg (minus digg's RDFa I guess).

A few things:

1. What is the keyboard shortcut? [Update 8 May 2008: Shift-D]
   
2. In the box that pops up where I enter my note, it has a check box for 'Add to shared items'. What happens when I uncheck that? Where does my note go? It doesn't seem to go to my Google Notebook(s). [Ok, it seems to just go to 'Notes' under 'Your Stuff' on the left panel of Reader, and I guess looking at it there I could then 'Share' it]
3. I've got the shared items widget on this blogger page, but it ignores my notes. That needs to not happen.
4. [Added after first posting] How do I un-note something?
   

In fact, if the bookmarklet gave me the option of not bookmarking the current page (just making a share-able note), then I can roll my shared items and twitter feed all into one. That'd be totally sweet. Google, I know you are listening...

[Update (<5 minutes after original post): Also something relatively new (I never saw announcements for it, and it didn't seem to be there a few days ago) in reader is that you can see who your friends are that can see your shared items. Of course... I don't have many :( ]
[Update (<10 minutes after original post): Could this be a step in liberating twitter? Also I noticed my first link was a link to a feedburner page, so I updated that]

I spend most of my online time in Google Reader (or links followed from it). It's only taken about 6 months to become a complete addict (not necessarily of reader, but rss/atom in general). My feed list is currently sitting just under 200, and I go through all of my feeds religiously. If there's something I want to come back to, I star it, but at the end of any given day, I have no unread items (approx. 3-4 hundred items/day). Recently, I've been thinking about changing things up a little. There are plenty of feeds out there which I simply can't keep up with. For example, I used to subscribe to the main Digg feed, but couldn't keep up. To manage that, I just subscribed to the subcategories I was interested in. But then I found Mixx and LinkRiver, and am getting a little overwhelmed.

There was a post recently over at ReadWriteWeb with tips for feed reading. The number one tip was to oversubscribe. At the time I didn't think that was for me. But now I'm starting to think it'd be ok to not read all of my feeds. Except, some of my feeds I want to see every item from (basically all the feeds I have before adding mixx and linkriver). I knew in google reader you could specify what tag to start from. So I thought I'd make a new tag, 'start' with all of my normal feeds in it, to keep up with, and a tag 'firehose' to browse through when I get time, but not stress about reading.

The google reader 'Manage Subscriptions' interface is pretty friendly, letting you change tags and remove feeds, and quickly find feeds you are looking for. So I made a tag 'start', clicked 'select all feeds', and then under 'More Actions' chose 'add label' -> 'start'. Wait for it... wait for it... 'Ooops, an error has occurred. Please try again in a few seconds.' in the standard red bar across the top. Ok... well, trying again didn't seem to help.

Luckily, last night I'd decided to play around with how reader handles import/export of OPML files. Recall that OPML files are for outlines (and I guess are the typical way feed lists are stored), so they have a pretty obvious nested structure, and the file you'll get by exporting your feeds from reader is pretty easy to understand. There are <outline> elements that have just a title and name attribute, and these are the folders, and then within them are <outline> elements with feed information (name, url...). Let me distinguish these by saying 'folder' elements, and 'feed' elements. So here's what I found about importing:

• If a feed element is for a feed that you are already subscribed to, then the feed simply picks up a new tag for the folder element it lies in from the OPML file. So your feed now has multiple tags and will show up in multiple folders, if it didn't already.
• If a folder element is the same as an existing folder you have, the feeds will simply be added to that folder. That is, you won't end up with two folders with the same name or anything.
• If your OPML file has deeper nesting than folder/feed (which is what you get from a reader export, but not what you'd expect the generality of an outline to be capable of), the folders get flattened. For example, if your file has a folder element 'folder' with folder elements 'first' and 'second', which themselves just have feed elements, then in reader you will see 3 new folders: 'folder', 'first', and 'second', and feeds from the sub-folders will show up in both 'folder' and whatever sub-folder they are part of.

This seemed to be the setup I needed to do what I want: add a tag 'start' to all of my existing feeds. I exported my feeds to an OPML file and fired up my editor. Surrounding basically my whole file (that is, surrounding all of the <outline> elements) I added a new <outline> element, with attributes 'title' and 'text' both set to 'start'. Back in reader, I then told it to import this file. A short pause, and it said everything had gone through. Back in my feed list, I now have a 'start' folder in addition to all of the other folders I already had. All of my feeds show up in two places (items only get counted once, as it should be), so I can see what folder has how many items, and I can scroll through the items just as if I was looking at 'All Items'. But now I can go back and add feeds for things like mixx, linkriver, fark... (feeds with overwhelming numbers of items), tag them as 'firehose', and not feel bad if I don't get to them all.

[Damn, the list messes up my pretty left-hand borders again. I guess I'll have to mess about with some more css some time soon. Update (12 May 2008): I just put a span around everything. I should see if I can do that in my template, to save a step.]

So today has been claimed by some as annual Day Without Google. I'm starting it off, like I do so many of my other days, with a heaping pile of FAIL. I've already posted on this blog and used gmail, and plan to use reader when I'm done here. But I have not yet used google for a web search (well... I searched for some comics from the search bar on that page, and it happened to be powered by google... my b). I'm not sure how seriously I'll take 'Day Without Google', but that's because I'm a bad person. Maybe you'd like to give it a try. There are lots of search engines out there, and the folks at AltSearchEngines are happy to point you to some. And we're brought up to believe competition is a good thing. So... I'll be going now.

No, google doesn't (as far as I know) have a replacement for 'The Integrator'. Really, this is a followup to my last post about suggestions for them. What I've always felt about the various google services is their disconnection from each other. For no particularly good reason I do think it's getting better, but there's still a ways to go.

The main thing I'd like is a blending of reader and gmail, and this seems like a natural matching. I don't consider myself any sort of email power-user, I just need basic reading/writing capability (which reader has anyway...), so perhaps others really want the two services separate. I did find a greasemonkey script that claimed to put a 'Feeds' thing in gmail, but it didn't work (I think it was designed for the 'Older Version' of gmail, so I suppose I could just use that... but I'm a complainer). And I found that google can (does?) create an atom feed for your inbox. Of course, you need to log in, so the feed reader you want to use has to support the appropriate authentication. I'm still fairly suprised, though, that google reader doesn't handle the feed. I understand that making reader have all purpose authentication is a whole new feature (which I guess will happen someday anyway). But if I'm already logged into my google reader... it's the same login for my email... so what the crap? I'm sure I don't know enough about how all this is set up, so I'm sure it's reasonable that reader doesn't (can't?) get my email feed, but still.

Additionally, I found out something suprising (another suprising thing, that is) about the keyboard shortcuts experimental feature, and its relation to your web history that google keeps for you (if you let it). If you use keyboard shortcuts to open a link, google doesn't seem to notice you clicked on the link - in the sense that it doesn't show up in your web history. I should probably let them know, instead of blabbering about it to you. (Update: I just did)

In other (pointless) news, I updated my webpage yesterday. Now instead of being valid HTML 4.01 Transitional it validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. It wasn't a big modification, but I still feel like it's a step up. I mean... transitional sounds temporary, and conforming to a strict standard sounds hardcore. So look at me go. I also updated the dr. mario pictures bit. Before I had the dynamic picture set up using multiple images that I pretended to pre-cache by putting them in a div with style display:none. But I read about css sprites, and how putting lots of images into a single image is good because it cuts down on the number of requests to the server. Then you mess about with positioning and clipping to make it look like you use lots of small images. Supposedly (brief trials with firebug seemed to confirm it) you get faster load times with this method. I'm still pretty sure the css and javascript could be improved. Maybe next week.

Oh, and speaking of reader, I thought maybe I'd make a go at using the shared items thing. So I'm currently sharing a couple items. If you're curious, check me out. And did reader update their favicon recently, or is my memory just being shoddy?

So, in previous posts I have indicated ways to set up the keyboard shorcuts experimental search feature in google. I predicted that signing in to google, and then clicking the 'join' button on an experiment would translate to other computers. That is, my hope was that when I logged in at the office, my google searches would use keyboard shortcuts. Well, I played with it today and that is not the case! When playing with it, it felt more like clicking the 'join' button just set a cookie. I didn't experiment with this hypothesis too much, digging into my cookies or turning them off or anything, but that's not the point. The point is, some of my google preferences don't transfer to other computers when I log in. Which is annoying. So suggestion (1) is for them to fix this.

I also think the top menu choices (upper left), the links to other google services, should be customizable. That is, I should be able to pick (in order) a handful (≤7?) of the services I want linked to up there, and then that's what I'll see when I log in. And they can put the 'More' dropdown menu there, with the remaining ones. This is suggestion (2).

The final (real) suggestion is along the lines of suggestion (2). I get annoyed with the fact that switching between services opens up new tabs (presumably new windows that firefox interprets as tabs for me). If I wanted something to open in a new tab, I'd middle click on it. Clicking on these service links at the top should open, by default, in the same window. Make it so (or make it customizable), that's suggestion (3).

So, what do you all think? You like these suggestions? Have some of your own? Know who to talk to in order to make them happen? Know how to set it up already, without google making changes on their end? I guess one could probably mess about with making a greasemonkey script.

Suggestion (4) is directed to a larger audience, not just google. Somebody should sponsor me. Give me money to live for, say, a year (I'm not asking for more than my grad school salary), with the idea that I spend the time learning whatever I feel like. No pressure to do research, no pressure to produce anything useful for others. Just learn a lot, on my own schedule. If you felt like it, you could start setting aside money to do this now, and then we can work something out when I finish with grad school. Let me know.

For no particular reason, with no particular goal in mind, I've been thinking a little about star ratings (perhaps by writing something down here, I can free up those mental cycles for something I should actually be thinking about, like my research). Like in Netflix, you're supposed to rate a movie 1-5 stars. But I expect everybody has a different idea what those stars mean. For example, I've given very few movies 1 (though I do use 'not interested' for some movies I haven't seen). I interpret 2 as 'I wish I hadn't bothered sitting through that' (which I've hardly used), while 4 is 'I'd happily watch that again' and 5 is along the lines of 'I actively enjoyed that movie' or 'I'd consider owning that'. I left out 3, which is kinda my default if I don't really care. My point, though, is probably other people use different interpretations, maybe handing out more 5s or 1s, or fewer 3s. How do you interpret the netflix stars?

What's important, then, from a recommendation viewpoint, is not the actual rating, but the relative rating. If I give a movie a 3, that doesn't really mean anything by itself. It only means something in the context of all the other movies I've rated higher and lower. Movie ratings (and other such ratings) don't really form a poset; there is no absolute grading, only a relative grading. I'm sure if you are competing for the netflix prize, this isn't a new (or even worth-pointing-out) observation.

In my daily online experience, stars also come up in google reader (and occasionally in the web history or gmail). There they act only as a flag, a binary 'starred' versus 'unstarred'. And it's handy (especially with the 's' keyboard shortcut). What I'd like to see, especially in combination with the keyboard shortcuts experimental search option in google, is a 's' shortcut to star search results from google. Even without keyboard shortcuts on, just put the little star next to items so I could click to star/unstar them. This then gets saved in the web history bookmarks, just like if I'd gone in manually after the search and starred an item that I had clicked on. This is a lot easier than copying links into my google notebook, for example. I suppose I could check out the google notebook browser extension again, but I'm kinda not hugely keen on using browser extensions much. I'm not sure why.

Also, with the keyboard shortcuts experimental search feature in google, the 'O' shortcut opens the link in a new tab. But in my firefox, it doesn't open in the background (like it would if I middle-clicked). Is this the case for other people, or do I have something set up poorly? How do I change it?

While I'm at it, in an earlier post I mentioned how to easily use the keyboard shortcuts feature in google. I was just looking around today, and if you have a google account, there's an even easier way. At the experimental search labs page, just click 'Join this experiment'. I think I'm going to like this. At my office, I didn't configure my google keyword shortcut in firefox, so I don't have the keyboard shortcuts. But now, after I log in to google (which I'd do to check mail anyway), I'm expecting that I'll have those shortcuts. Hurray!

I don't expect anybody to care, but I want to have a record of it. This year I ran 1002.5 miles in 150 runs (6.68 miles per run avg.) totaling 120:41:32 for an average 8.31 miles per hour. Wouldn't mind getting the miles up and the time down next year. We'll see.

Sorry, to all my readers who waited eagerly over the past week or two for a new post. I was home and didn't feel like it. I was busy making origami and TeXing another book. Hopefully I'll have more to say again these days.

One thing I did do was change my google shortcut to use the keyboard shortcuts experimental feature. I love keyboard shortcuts. It was easy, just add '&esrch=BetaShortcuts' to the end of your request. Then I used the Ad-Blocker Plus Firefox extension to hide the message about how I'm currently using the keyboard shortcuts feature. Totally sweet.

There have already been numerous postings about it (Google's Knol), so I probably don't have much new to say. If you don't feel like reading the above links, its a user-generated knowledge base, similar in spirit to wikipedia (and apparently mahalo and squidoo, which I tried for the first time today (neither turned anything useful up on category theory, so I quit early)). I am excited about it, because it could be fun. As mentioned elsewhere, the project may cut into wikipedia's (which I also like) success. But if google('s algorithm) is fair about deciding quality of articles, it shouldn't be unreasonable. Both systems should be able to coexist, they both have a place and will both contribute to global knowledge. As pointed out in the above links, the two systems are based on slightly different principles. Where wikipedia is focusing on having a single page for a topic, google is encouraging competition - and rewarding winners with ad revenue.

Would I post to it? Sure, if I thought I knew something I could post about. Would I read articles from it? Of course. Hopefully there'll be some good math ones. I've basically been waiting to try getting my math database together until google (or somebody else) beats me to it. They sure are taking their time though. On that note, while I'm here, I was reading the conference proceedings from the third international MKM conference, and the article on c-corn looked like it'd be inspiring. We'll see.

This is certainly an exciting time. We've got applications becoming more and more web based, and hopefully in the process more open. We've got olpc and co. distributing laptops to (hopefully) millions of children worldwide, opening everybody's worldview (maybe?). And this large new set of users mean more big changes are probably right around the corner.

Talked with Sean yesterday, who raised doubts about the olpc mission. I still wonder, like him, if laptops are really the priority. Maybe I should be giving my money to another cause? Which? Is it ok to pick one, make myself believe I'm helping, and keep about my day to day life? Or should I quit everything and sign up for the peace corp? Live escetically so I'm able to donate more? Buy a laptop and try to come up with a program to write for it that kids would benefit from? Buy one and not?

What a mess. I think I'll go have some ice cream.